Clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he is achieving something better even than the portrait of a book.  But what, at all costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a portrait of one kind or another the rag-bag of his own moral, political or religious opinions.  It is one of the most difficult things in the world for anyone who happens to hold strong opinions not to make the mind of Shakespeare himself a pulpit from which to roar them at the world.  Reviewers with theories about morality and religion can seldom be induced to come to the point of portraiture until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column of self-explanation.  In their eyes a review is a moral essay rather than an imaginative interpretation.  In dissenting from this view, one is not pleading for a race of reviewers without moral or religious ideas, or even prepossessions.  One is merely urging that in a review, as in a novel or a play, the moral should be seated at the heart instead of sprawling all over the surface.  In the well-worn phrase it should be implicit, not explicit.  Undoubtedly a rare critic of genius can make an interesting review-article out of a statement of his own moral and political ideas.  But that only justifies the article as an essay, not as a review.  To many reviewers—­especially in the bright days of youth—­it seems an immensely more important thing to write a good essay than a good review.  And so it is, but not when a review is wanted.  It is a far, far better thing to write a good essay about America than a good review of a book on America.  But the one should not be substituted for the other.  If one takes up a review of a book on America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the author thinks, not what the reviewer thinks.  If the reviewer begins with a paragraph of general remarks about America—­or, worse still, about some abstract thing like liberty—­he is almost invariably wasting paper.  I believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this kind.  They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into the middle of things.  I say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewer whose preliminary paragraphs I would not miss for worlds.  But one has even known book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they made scarcely any reference to the books under review at all.

To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of the purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journalists to the quotational review.  It is the custom to despise the quotational review—­to dismiss is as mere “gutting.”  As a consequence, it is generally very badly done.  It is done as if under the impression that it does not matter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space.  One great paper lends support to this contemptuous